PBS is only .0012% of the budget. Cancelling PBS to save significant money is like not buying tic-tacs at the grocery store and telling your spouse that you were trying to save hundreds of dollars. When you look at the numbers, it appears quite foolish. It also will get rid of many American jobs.

Start with cutting the rates on overpriced government contractors working for American companies that headquarter in places like Dubai so they don't have to pay taxes, and you'd be surprised on how much more substantial an effect that would be than cutting PBS, or NASA for that matter. There are far better places to remove grift from the government - he just used PBS because it made for an ear-catching soundbite that would rile people up.

An amazing movie. Fun fact: This movie was released only a few months before Snuffy was officially recognized as real, rather than imaginary. Several indicators in the movie hint that he would soon be made officially real, examples:
He has an actual house that Big Bird visits
He sends Big Bird a rather large postcard that others acknowledge
Big Bird has a scene where he misses snuffy and imagines him, but notes that they cant touch.

you know what's really foolish? Sesame Street and the Sesame Workshop are self-supporting. They needed the help of PBS and government funding to become so (another example of what Obama was trying to explain about how someone has helped all of us at one time or another). But they had an experimental model, and they needed to start it somewhere commercial (seriously, people who are suggesting that what we need are MORE commercially sponsored children's shows are idiots. Have any of you ever watched a child watching product licensed shows?).

Sesame Workshop does get some government assistance - but they get 5 times as much from other governments as they get from the American one (the Canadian government gives twice as much directly). You know what they do with American funding? They create special directed shows for military families, including children who have lost a parent in military service. http://www.sesamestreet.org/parents/topicsandactivities/toolkits/tlc

although i agree its not costing much from the deficit to support pbs where is the money that they get from merchandise and other licensing going , the sesame street sales alone should offset many costs

"He said he would not borrow money from China to keep it going."
The money was already borrowed from China by the Bush Administration, and it's called our national debt. We owe it. Many things were said by Romney in the debate that either had no merit but sounded great to people who don't have enough background of information to realize he was lying.

"although i agree its not costing much from the deficit to support pbs where is the money that they get from merchandise and other licensing going , the sesame street sales alone should offset many costs"
These are all great distractions from the real issues, such as taxing millionaires and billionaires.
Reagan was so successful at distracting the public from corporate welfare by making his issue the single mother on food stamps...same thing. Corporations making billions in profits and not paying taxes???--making the public clean up their toxic messes? NO! It's the single mother on food stamps killing this country!

@pjlaw1: except that was a notably simplified thing to say. We have not borrowed money from China. We have borrowed money in general, and the Chinese gov't has bought the debt from corps that have made the loans. at no point has the US borrowed directly from China. What I do not understand is why thousands of people, many of whom have had debt collectors buy their debt, don't understand that this is exactly what China has done. The only way to avoid China owning some of the US debt is not to incur any debt, and there are actually very good reasons of international economics to have other countries holding US debt.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting receives about $450million from Congress each year. About $280million goes to PBS and the local stations.

Federal funding makes up about 12 per cent of the PBS budget.

President and CEO Gary Knell received $956,513 -- nearly a million dollars -- in compensation in 2008. And, from 2003 to 2006, "Sesame Street" made more than $211 million from toy and consumer product sales.

If you break that down, it works out to over $50 million a year "Sesame Street" is taking in from all that merchandising.

Yep, that one-percenter Big Bird makes about four times what Mitt Romney does annually

The bottom line for my liberal friends who see Mitt Romney as an EVIL person ready to GUT PBS...fear not....BIG BIRD can survive in the Free market....he is a Capitalist at Heart.

Woot.com is operated by Woot Services LLC.
Products on Woot.com are sold by Woot, Inc., other than items on Wine.Woot which are sold by the seller specified on the product detail page.
Product narratives are for entertainment purposes and frequently employ
literary point of view;
the narratives do not express Woot's editorial opinion.
Aside from literary abuse, your use of this site also subjects you to Woot's
terms of use
and
privacy policy.
Woot may designate a user comment as a Quality Post, but that doesn't mean we agree with or guarantee anything said or linked to in that post.

Not a farewell, just a forced redirect.

It's true, Local.Woot is no longer, but please don't despair.

Never-ending savings are still to be found on Deals.Woot each and every day, so come on in. Don't think of it as a time for tears. Think of it as a way to bring us all closer together under one roof.

Sorry

This is only for people who have bought woots

We restrict voting to users who have purchased something from one of the other Woot stores. It's not just because we want your money (which we do) - it's the best way to be sure all the votes are coming from real people and not spam-bots or phony accounts. The best way we can think of, anyway. For now.

You can always get voting rights by buying something from one of Woot's other sites:

Purchases through Deals.Woot don't count, because in that case you're not buying anything from us. And we don't have your account information for those purchases.

If you think you've bought something from Woot before and still can't vote, make sure you're logged in with the same account you used to buy from us.

Geez, why so negative?

You have to vote up more before you can vote down.

Don't get us wrong. Negativity has its place. And downvotes are just as essential as upvotes when it comes to making Deals.Woot a useful place to find deals.

But when your votes lean so heavily toward the dark side, we have to wonder. Go vote up a few things. Accentuate the positive for a little while. It'll do you some good, and it'll do the site some good, too. Then you can get back to dealing out the smackdowns, OK?

Too late, we all heard you!

Hmm... you're wanting to take your vote back?

Well, that's a bit tricky. See, we do a lot of stuff with your vote, using it to work out the popularity of what you voted for, compare that to all the other things voted on, tally up our leaderboard, work out your reputation. Someday we'll do a little cartoon showing just how hard your vote is working.

Anyway, taking votes back messes all that up, so we give you five minutes, in case you just mis-clicked. After that we've got to say no take-backs. Luckily, votes are free, so feel free to throw them around left and right wherever you see fit.